Academic literature on the topic 'Zimbabwe – Elections, 2008 – Case studies'

This paper argues that electoral processes in Africa with special focus on Zimbabwe are never fair due to rampant electoral illiteracy. In this paper, illiteracy is far beyond the inability to read and write but encompasses a high degree of ignorance from not reading. The theory informing arguments in the paper is democratic citizenship. This is a qualitative research where data has been gathered through interviews and observation. Zimbabwe’s election processes of 2008, 2013 and 2018 had been used as case studies to substantiate the findings of this study. The major findings are that besides electoral illiteracy, factors such as intimidation, fear, manipulation (vote buying), partisan and hero worshipping also compromise the credibility of elections in Zimbabwe. The other finding is that as long as citizens are not familiar with electoral process of their country, the levels of participation of such people will remain low. In the light of these findings, this research recommends effective active citizenship if electoral crisis in Zimbabwe is to be addressed. Keywords: Democracy, Democratic Citizenship, Electoral Illiteracy

Hegemonic party regimes are non-democratic regimes that (1) rule with the aid of a dominant political party and (2) hold multi-party elections. Elite coalitions organized under the aegis of a hegemonic party are most vulnerable in elections that coincide with poor economic performance. A declining economy provides elites with a platform around which they can mobilize support to challenge incumbents in elections. As a result, the likelihood of defections from hegemonic parties increases as income declines. This study’s original dataset, which includes 227 elections for the chief executive in hegemonic party dictatorships from 1946 to 2004, and its case studies of defections in Zimbabwe under ZANU-PF in 2008 and Turkey under the Democratic Party in 1955 provide evidence for this proposition.

This paper examines the implications of Zimbabwe's 2013 harmonised elections on the opposition's continued deployment of the rights-based discourse to make moral and political claims against and demands of the state. Since 2000, two polarising strands of the human rights discourse −1) the right to self-determination and 2) civil and political rights – were deployed by the state and the opposition, respectively, in order to challenge extant relations and structures of power. The acutely strained state–society relations in post-2000 Zimbabwe emanated from human rights violations by the state as it responded to challenges to its political power and legitimacy. However, the relative improvement in the human rights situation in the country since the 2009 coalition government came into office, and during and since the recently concluded peaceful 2013 elections – the flawed electoral process itself notwithstanding – suggests a need for alternative new ways to make moral and political demands of the state in the future.

Scholars have long been interested in investigating why and how ruling parties manipulate elections in Africa and elsewhere. Despite the importance of such a subject, much remains unknown about the role of incumbents in strategically manipulating electoral processes and outcomes in by-elections in particular. Debate rages on as to whether ruling parties rely exclusively on coercive methods or, in addition, make use of non-repressive methods. In seeking to contribute to addressing this matter, we draw upon a case study of two by-elections held in 2017 in rural constituencies in Zimbabwe, namely Bikita West and Mwenezi East. Our research involved evidence gleaned through personal observations, review of grey literature and personal reflections. Our study established that competitive authoritarian regimes as found in Zimbabwe combine both methods when manipulating by-elections. However, we show that there has been a shift away from heavy reliance on organised acts of naked political violence on the part of the ZANU-PF ruling party since the disputed 2008 elections and in the subsequent 2013 and post-2013 by-elections. Thus, there appears to be an inclination towards the use of subtle methods, including patronage, assisted voting, use of traditional leadership and appealing to the rendition of past violence. Nonetheless, even these methods impinge on the credibility of not only by-elections but also national elections in Zimbabwe.

The idea that economic conditions influence election outcomes and voting behavior is hardly novel and would appear to be close to uniformly accepted, especially in the case of American presidential elections. Beginning with the early aggregate studies (Arcelus and Meltzer 1975; Bloom and Price 1975; Kramer 1971; Tufte 1978) and the important individual-level work that followed soon thereafter (Kiewiet 1983; Kinder and Kiewiet 1979, 1981; Fiorina 1981), election scholars have devoted considerable attention to the influence of the economy on voting behavior and election outcomes. Although the findings are many and sometimes disparate, a few general conclusions have emerged: economic voting is incumbency oriented rather than policy oriented (Fiorina 1981; Kiewiet 1983); at the individual level, evaluations of the national economy are more closely tied to vote choice than are evaluations of personal finances (Kiewiet 1983; Kinder and Kiewiet 1979, 1981; Kinder, Adams, and Gronke 1989); and, with the exception of 2000, the incumbent party is habitually returned to office when economic times are good and tossed out when economic times are bad (Campbell and Garand 2000). In short, we know a lot about how the economy influences voters and elections, and it would seem that there are few issues left to resolve.

We examine the relationship between the racial composition of state electorates and white racial attitudes, arguing that the racial threat hypothesis should characterize this relationship. Specifically, we make the case for why greater black electoral strength should lead to more racially conservative policy preferences and more negative racial stereotypes among whites. Our findings are consistent with this expectation. However, this relationship is dependent on two contexts. We find that black electoral strength mattered in the context of the racially-salient 2008 national elections, but not during the 2000 or 2004 elections. Also, consistent with the racial threat hypothesis, we find that black electoral strength influences racial attitudes only among whites who have greater reason to fear economic competition from African Americans. Overall, our findings are consistent with recent studies demonstrating that the influence of racial composition on white racial attitudes is dependent on context.

Abstract Electoral debates are a win-lose game in which the stakes for the political contenders are extremely high. The antagonistic nature of these encounters very frequently results in impoliteness or face aggravating moves with which the debaters aim to hurt the opponent’s positive or negative face. The aim of this research is to investigate the impoliteness strategies employed by politicians during electoral debates. Garcia-Pastor’s (2008) positive-face and negative-face impoliteness strategies are taken as a starting point in the analysis at hand. The final electoral debate of the 2019 presidential elections in the Republic of North Macedonia is used as a data source for this research, which is based on several different hypotheses and is both qualitatively and quantitative oriented. The findings of the research are in line with the insights gained from previous studies, which, more or less, suggests that Macedonian politicians follow the mainstream “rules” when it comes to using impoliteness in political debates.

AbstractWar comes with terrible costs both in terms of money and lives. Do voters punish incumbents for these costs? Much of the existing literature on the effects of war deaths on public opinion toward incumbents and their war efforts suggests that the answer is yes. We test this proposition on data from a non-US case: Canada's war in Afghanistan. We estimate models of the effect of local war deaths on incumbent support using individual-level panel data from the 2006, 2008 and 2011 Canadian Election Studies and aggregate district-level data from the 2008 and 2011 general elections. In none of our models do we find support for the conclusion that war deaths decrease support for candidates of the governing party. Instead, we find evidence at both the individual and district levels that support for Conservative party candidates is higher in districts that experienced war deaths.

Rationalist models of judicial decision-making expect courts to defend their institutional integrity in politically sensitive cases. This article presents two African case studies of courts not doing so. They have elicited predictable backlash from executives and placed their institutions in avoidable danger. I argue that judges’ desire for esteem from emerging global judicial networks can explain this otherwise puzzling behaviour. These new networks become particularly salient in human rights cases. This conclusion partially supports Anne-Marie Slaughter’s controversial claims about the significance of ‘the global community of law’ but also identifies risks this poses for courts’ domestic authority. The argument is made with reference to two recent and well-known decisions by the High Court of Botswana and the Southern African Development Community Tribunal. The first case, Sesana (2006), dealt with the vexed question of indigenous rights in Africa. The second case, Campbell (2008), concerned the compensation of expropriated commercial farmers from Zimbabwe.

Metaphor has been studied as a pervasive and intrinsic discourse tool over the last decades in many different types of discourse (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Semino 2008, Kövecses 2010, etc.). Considering the strong effect it has on the discourse participants and how it can persuade them towards one side, action, or thought (Charteris-Black 2004, Silaski 2012), it is necessary to study it when the timeframe and the discourse where it is used are ideologically loaded. Based on recent studies on metaphor in economics (Alejo 2010, Herrera-Soler and White 2012, Soares da Silva et al. 2017), metaphor in the press (Koller 2004/2008) and metaphor and ideology (Goatly 2007, Silaski 2012), this article presents a corpus-based study of metaphor in reports of economic affairs in the English and Spanish press during the pre-election week of 2015. The corpus (about 160,000 words) consists of reports published by six newspapers that support different political spheres (left, centre and right): The Guardian, The Independent and The Telegraph in English, and Público, El País and ABC in Spanish. From a Critical Metaphor Analysis perspective (Charteris-Black 2004), the study starts from the hypothesis that the political stand of each newspaper might condition the metaphors. Indeed, metaphors pointing at certain side of political spheres appear in all the sub-corpora of the study, but in distinctive ways, as will be shown. In any case, critical factors such as cognitive and cultural reasons beyond the political stand of the media in question need to be acknowledged as well, which conveys further and more comprehensive analyses.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-150)
It is increasingly becoming apparent that elections, as component parts of democratic processes, do not always guarantee a smooth transfer of power and stable democratic cultures in many contemporary polities. Whenever election outcomes are disputed, Governments of National Unity (GNU) are presented as strategic conflict prevention and resolution models. Yet, the GNU’s ability to nurture democracy in situations where it remains weak or non-existent is extremely limited. This dissertation therefore uses Zimbabwe’s case study to examine how its recent internal political turmoil had overwhelming implications for its legitimacy and democracy. Through qualitative research, the study reveals that despite partially reconciling Zimbabwe’s political protagonists, the GNU neither permanently resolved the crisis nor addressed significant related issues; thus, creating a paradox of legitimacy for the country. The dissertation concludes with recommendations for further research on matters of legitimacy in power-sharing scenarios such as Zimbabwe’s.
Political Sciences
M.A. (International politics)

Blogging continues to get attention in the field of communication studies for reasons such as its differences with traditional media and its various effects in societies. The first part of this dissertation provides the reader with a background of the use of the Internet in Zimbabwe highlighting how it has offered individuals a platform to publish their own content, thus increasing the documentation of the 2008 Zimbabwean elections. This research analyses how national identity and the construction thereof emerges from online personal narratives. The research also investigates the discourses shaping the country‘s identities such as humanitarian, anti-Mugabe and democratic discourses that emerge from the blogs and how these blogs communicate events that occurred during the polls. This dissertation is primarily concerned with how citizens have arguably become recognized as sources of information and how Zimbabwe is perceived. Finally, the blogs are critically examined for how they create spaces of resistance. I argue that the blogs challenged and destabilized the older patterns of identity creation within Zimbabwe. Whereas national identity constructions have been largely a result of the majority or ruling class, the production of counter discourses in the blogs suggests that at an individual level, citizens use the Internet as a platform to express their dissent and do not automatically internalize these projected national identities.
Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2011.

This thesis explores the post-apartheid South Africa's Africa policy through the lens of Kalevi Holsti's 'national role conceptions' conceptual framework. One of the most significant preoccupations of the post-apartheid South Africa's foreign policymakers in the Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki administrations (1994-2008) was defining the country's new identity. This was indeed not a simple task by any measure. In assigning national roles to their country, the Mandela and Mbeki administrations struggled to divorce South Africa and themselves from an apartheid-inspired foreign policy deeply rooted in the Global North. The new foreign policy that emerged was largely couched in morality, Africa, and the Global South. There were two distinctive features of this foreign policy, however. While Mandela emphasised the promotion of human rights in Africa as South Africa's major national role, Mbeki preoccupied his administration in the task of renewing Africa. South Africa played a leadership role through walking a tight rope in constructing partnerships with both African countries and the developed countries, anchored in ending conflicts and supporting economic development. However, this thesis argues that Pretoria, seat of South Africa's government, realised that national role conceptions as defined by Holsti do not operate in a global vacuum. Case studies are examined to argue that, given its global ranking as a 'middle power', South Africa's national roles were more successful in areas of its African interventions where its national interest converged with those of powerful countries in the Global North. Pretoria's interventions in Lesotho, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, although often faced with operational hiccups, were by and large fairly successful. This was precisely because Pretoria's national roles, in the above-mentioned countries in which it intervened to resolve conflicts, converged with bigger powers within the global arena. In the case of South Africa's intervention in Zimbabwe, this thesis argues that it was difficult to enforce its national roles as they came in direct conflict with those of the developed countries in the West, led by Britain and the United States of America. Therefore, South Africa failed to register foreign policy successes because of the stalemate between its own national role conceptions and those of external powers.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.